Regie.ai, a startup that uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating system to create sales and marketing content for brands, today announced it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Foundation Capital. , South Park Commons, Day One Ventures and prominent angel investors. The new investment comes as VCs see a growing opportunity in AI-powered, copy-generating adtech companies, whose technology promises to save time and potentially increase personalization.
Directing was founded in 2020 by Matt Millen and Srinath Sridhar. Sridhar, formerly a software engineer at Google and Meta, is a data scientist by profession and has developed enterprise-level AI systems that detect duplicate images and rank search results. Millen was previously VP at T-Mobile and led the national sales teams (for example, strategic accounts and the public sector).
With Regie, Sridhar says he and Millen wanted to create a way for businesses to interact with their customers through channels such as email, social media, text, podcasts, online advertising, and more. Because companies have so many platforms and media at their disposal to talk to customers, he notes, it can be challenging for content marketers to continuously produce compelling content to reach their customers.
“The way content is generated has fundamentally changed,” Sridhar told londonbusinessblog.com in an email interview. “Marketers and copywriters working in the enterprise…increasingly [need] to produce and manage content and content workflows at scale.”
Regie uses GPT-3 to power its service – the same GPT-3 that can generate poetry, prose and academic papers. But it’s a “flavor” of GPT-3, aligned with a training dataset of about 20,000 sales series (the sequence of steps to convert prospects into paying customers) and nearly 100 million sales emails. Also in the mix are custom language systems built by Regie to display brands and their messages, designed to integrate with existing sales platforms such as Outreach, HubSpot and SalesLoft.
Image Credits: Direction
In order to prevent the systems from spewing problematic language, Regie says that every system goes through “human curation” and vetting before being released. The startup also claims to train the systems in “inclusive” language and test them for biases, such as biases against certain demographics.
Customers can use Regie to generate original, search engine-optimized content or create custom sales strings. The platform also offers blog and social media post authoring tools for personalizing posts, as well as a Chrome extension that analyzes the “quality” of emails customers send — and optionally rewrites the text.
“Generative AI is completely disrupting the way content is created today. Regie’s biggest competitors would be the major content authoring and management platforms that will first be completely redesigned by AI in the future,” Sridhar said confidently. “For example, Adobe’s suite of products including Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, now Figma and Adobe Experience Cloud will become obsolete as Regie continues to build an intelligent platform for creating and managing content for the enterprise.”
More immediately, Regie is competing with vendors like Jasper, Phrasee, Copysmith, and Copy.ai — all of whom tap AI to generate custom marketing copy. But Sridhar argues that Regie is a more vertical platform suitable for go-to-market teams in the enterprise, combining text, images and workflows in a single pane of glass.
“GEnerative AI is such a paradigm shift that it will not only increase the productivity and revenue of companies, but also the bottom line at the same time. Few products can improve on both sides of that financial equation.” Sridhar continued. “So if a company wants to cut costs because it wants to use sales tools, or reduce outsourced writing while increasing revenue, Regie can do it. If you are an outsourced marketing agency that wants to retain more customers and efficiently generate content on a large scale, Regie can certainly do that for agencies too.”
The company currently has more than 70 software-as-a-service customers with annual contracts, including AT&T, Sophos, Okta and Crunchbase. Sridhar did not disclose revenue, but said he expects the 25-strong company to grow “meaningly” this year.
“This is a revolutionary new field. And as always, adoption requires educating the users,” said Sridhar. “It is clear to us as practitioners that the world has changed. But it will take time for others to get their hands dirty and convince themselves that this is happening – and that it is a very positive development. So we have to be patient in educating the industry. We also need to show that the quality of the content is not compromised and that it can perform better and be maintained more consistently with the strategic application of AI.”
To date, Regie has raised $14.8 million.